If you're a gamer of a certain age (cough, in your 30s), you long for the days of sitting on a basement couch playing split-screen games with your buddies. Mario Party and Halo were splitting 32-inch TVs into four squares! Nowadays you don't see much of that. Modern graphics and consoles have done away with couch co-op. The last Halo title didn't even have local split screen for two players. Coincidentally, the year Halo Infinite debuted was when the co-op revival truly began.
In 2021, It Takes Two—a co-op adventure that I can only describe as Toy Story for the newly divorced—won Game of the Year and put Hazelight Studios on the map. For die-hard gamers, creative director Josef Fares was already a household name after his infamous "fuck the Oscars" speech at the 2017 Game Awards, which would, in four years, honour him for making the best game of 2021.
Well, what did Fares pull off after another four years? Split Fiction. It's a send-up of classic sci-fi and fantasy storytelling that expands upon the innovative cooperative gameplay of It Takes Two and adds plenty of invigorating twists of its own. You and a friend will speed through cyberspace, ride dragons, and work together to stop a scheming CEO from stealing your ideas. The new title, out today, follows up its acclaimed predecessor with another exhilarating two-player adventure full of genre-hopping gameplay.
Now, Split Fiction is not without its share of flaws, but none of its co-op peers are really even trying to operate on its level. Hazelight is once again setting the standard for co-op gaming—and by the end of its 15-hour run, Split Fiction raises the bar entirely.
You can play Split Fiction online or locally, but no matter what, you have to play the game with someone else. That's the pitch. Because this is nonnegotiable, every copy of the game comes with a Friend's Pass. Meaning: You don't need to convince your high school buddy in Maine to shell out 50 bucks so you can play together. Since you paid Split Fiction's SGD69 price tag, you just have to convince them to take some time out of their day. It's an easier ask. For me, it was my girlfriend—a steady Marvel Snap player who is a fairly causal gamer otherwise. We sat on the couch and played the whole thing in split screen on my PS5 Pro, from start to finish.
It was always easy for both of us to figure out where to go, what to do, and how to engage with whatever new gimmick Split Fiction threw our way. If I had to levy a critique against it, I'd nitpick and say every level ends about 15 to 30 minutes after we tired of the shtick. Aside from that, well, the fact that my partner and I made the time in a busy TV season when Severance, Paradise, and Yellowjackets are dominating our weeknights speaks to how much fun we had.
Split Fiction is relentless in introducing fresh ideas and tossing out the old. Every level is a new playground. At its core, Split Fiction is a 3D action platformer in the vein of Ratchet & Clank. You have a double-jump move and a grappling hook. The addition of another player gives nearly every stage a puzzle element—and you will either work separately or in tandem to solve them.
But on top of this, Split Fiction pulls from the best parts of different genres for each level, not just in how it decorates the sci-fi and fantasy worlds you're exploring (conjured directly from the imagination of the characters you are playing, which I'll explain later) but in what you're doing from moment to moment. Split Fiction gleefully borrows from Diablo, Tron, and plenty of other games and movies I won't spoil. Just know that it's a visual feast and a blast all the way to the end.
The apex of Split Fiction's creativity (until its bonkers finale, at least) comes in the form of Side Stories that break up the coherent level you're exploring with some truly random shit. An early favourite had me controlling a pig that farts rainbows. Another was a radical tribute to one of my favourite retired EA franchises. Side Stories aren't just fun diversions; they often reveal something about the psyche and past traumas of one of the two main characters. Which means that it's about time I fully talk about the plot of Split Fiction. I've been dreading this part.
Here's the gist: Mio is a young, unpublished writer. She is brunette and she loves science fiction. Zoe is a young, unpublished writer. She is blonde and she loves fantasy. The two meet for the first time at the offices of Rader, a megacorp that has promised to publish their work. It turns out that Rader (an Elon Musk–type CEO) is tricking them all, but they only figure this out once they are strapped into a literal machine built to steal their ideas and put them into Rader's... well, whatever Rader makes. That isn't entirely clear.
What's crystal clear is that Split Fiction is a story about AI, large language models, and digital plagiarism in art. The machine creates simulations from Zoe's and Mio's story ideas as they chase an errant glitch that they immediately decide is the MacGuffin that will get them out of here. This plot is a mere excuse to get to Split Fiction's main gimmick, as you travel fantasy and sci-fi worlds that were built to allow the game's designers to flex their creative muscles. And flex they do. The writers? Not so much.
After spending over a dozen hours with Zoe and Mio, I understood their paper-thin traumas and still didn't care. Rader is never convincing as a villain, and as a result the AI metaphor doesn't stick the landing.
As a big SSF nerd, I found Split Fiction's sci-fi elements more lacking than its foray into the fantasy genre. It's pretty easy to feel Harry Potter and Game of Thrones within the fantasy bits; while those aren't my favourite influences, it's at least drawing on something specific. More often than not, the futuristic neons and robotic perils of Mio's mind wind up as a sterile, generic amalgamation devoid of what makes the genre interesting.
If you stick with it until the end, Split Fiction rewards you with one of the most jaw-dropping hours of a video game I've ever played. It's an incredible climax that innovates in the medium and sets the stage for what might be next for this team.
The best part of Split Fiction is that it's gorgeous and easy for all skill levels to learn, and it offers both players entertaining, varied activities the entire way through. If you're looking for the next game to play with your spouse, sibling, or child, this is the one for you.
